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Tech News
Zoox, the driverless-vehicle company Amazon acquired for $1.2 billion in 2020, has begun charging passengers for rides in San Francisco and Las Vegas. Its boxy, steering-wheel-free vehicles seat up to four people and are limited to roads with speed limits of 45 mph or below under NHTSA's approval, which permits up to 5,000 vehicles over two years.
A workplace analysis outlines seven common leadership behaviors that gradually erode employee morale and push skilled workers to leave their jobs. Rather than a single bad incident, the piece argues these are repeated patterns—like poor communication, favoritism, or lack of recognition—that accumulate over time until employees decide to walk away.
Andrew Ng, founder of Coursera and a Stanford lecturer, analyzed over 10,000 job postings and interviewed AI experts, hiring managers and recruiters to compile a list of four core skills needed for AI development careers, including building AI applications with LLMs and agentic workflows, plus solid software engineering fundamentals. Some industry observers argue his list leans too heavily on technical building skills and overlooks other necessary competencies.
Marketing firm Vital Design saw organic blog traffic drop 60% as AI search tools rose, yet its sales-ready leads held steady or grew. The company credits a strategy called answer engine optimization (AEO), which aims to get AI chatbots to recommend a business during a customer's research phase before they ever visit a website.
Outdoor gear maker Arc'teryx is beginning a company-wide redesign effort aimed at making every product it manufactures fully recyclable, starting with one of its most technically complex hard shell jackets. The initiative is being framed as a multiyear circularity program rather than a single product launch.
Google has released three new Gemini Audio models: 3.5 Transcribe, 3.5 Live, and 3.5 Live Experimental. Transcribe automatically strips out filler words like 'um' and 'uh', formats text, adapts to custom vocabulary and jargon, and can identify up to three speakers with word-level timestamps. The Live models improve handling of interruptions, multilingual recognition, and real-time reasoning narration for voice chat.
GoPro's new Mission 1 Pro ILS shares the same 8K/60 video, 1-inch sensor, open-gate recording and 960fps burst mode as the standard Mission 1 Pro, but swaps the fixed lens for a mount compatible with over 300 Micro Four Thirds lenses. The camera keeps the same battery and rear display, though attaching a lens adds bulk and weight depending on which optic is used.
NASA astronaut Christina Koch revealed she spent her first week back from the 10-day Artemis II lunar mission journaling about the experience while deliberately avoiding any mission photos. She wanted to capture her memories as they actually felt before the widely shared images could reshape them. Koch, along with commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover and specialist Jeremy Hansen, completed the farthest human trip around the moon in over 50 years in early April.
Google's Pixel 11 Pro retains the vivid, bright screen praised in its predecessor, but review testing found it throttles and shows overheating and battery-drain warnings when graphics settings are pushed above minimum levels. Google also dropped the 128GB storage tier across the lineup, meaning the cheapest configuration now starts at $1,099 for 256GB, with only 12GB of RAM at that entry level. Google attributed the higher storage and pricing to an AI-driven RAM shortage raising component costs industrywide.
Amazon's Ring is rolling out a new encryption scheme called Throw Away the Key Encryption (TAKE) starting this September. Under the system, video is protected by rotating encryption keys, and Ring can only briefly access its stored copy of the key to power AI features like face detection or video summaries before permanently deleting that copy, cutting off further access to the footage.
PeopleFinders.com, the online data broker, has launched a new platform called Stud or Dud that lets users run background checks on potential romantic partners using just a name or phone number. The tool compiles public records—including court documents, bankruptcy filings, tax liens, and social media activity—into a single report covering finances, assets, employment, and criminal history, complete with an AI-generated summary and flagged 'red' or 'green' indicators.
QueryStory, founded by former Google Chronicle co-founder Shapor Naghibzadeh, has launched publicly after raising a $6 million seed round from Brightmind Ventures and New York Life Ventures at a $60 million valuation. The startup applies techniques Naghibzadeh developed for cybersecurity investigations to build large language model tools that let enterprises query proprietary databases and construct fact-based narratives from the results.